On Tuesday, President Joe Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which among its Democratic-favored grab-bag of provisions included $80 billion in additional funding over the next 10 years for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a 53 percent increase over the agency's projected budgetary baseline.
Because everyone pays taxes, and because the bill's passage depended heavily on projections that a beefed-up IRS would locate and extract an additional $204 billion in currently unpaid revenue, many citizens became nervous about what the law would mean for them. To dampen the disquiet, the White House and Treasury Department in the run-up to the bill's final passage made escalatory claims—untethered to any statutory language and in contradiction to projections by both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT)—that the historic enforcement increase would not increase the audit rates on American households earning less than $400,000 per year. Opposing Republicans, meanwhile, have been making frequently hyperbolic critiques about the IRA funding "87,000 new IRS agents" and so forth.
